Ed Fisher: The evolution of creativity

Sunday, March 3, 2013

Creativity has been of interest to me for a long time. In a high school in Norwalk, Connecticut, a small group of students “created” a trip to the moon, with scale model sets of the launch site, cockpit, space and a moonscape, made slides of the voyage, and used a flash gun and sound effects that went off as the rocket took off. We presented “Beyond” to several high schools in the area and had a lot of fun with it, all nearly two decades before Apollo 11 delivered Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the Lunar surface.

In 1991 my wife, Nedra, went to the International Creativity Conference sponsored by the Alden B. Dow Center for Creativity & Enterprise in Midland, MI. She was so impressed with the people she met there that she convinced me to go the next year. From then until 2001 we both attended, first as part of the audience, then as discussants on panels, then as writers and presenters, and then as members of the conference committee. (www.northwood.edu.)

If you ask someone to define “creativity” he or she is likely to respond “to be able to think outside the box.” The cliché is based on a simple game often played in Psych 101. A student is handed a piece of paper on which is printed a diagram: three parallel rows with three dots in each. The instructions are simple. Using only four lines and never taking the pencil off the paper connect all nine of the dots. Try it; it can be done, but only by drawing parts of three of the lines “outside the box.” (See my Morning Sun blog for February 22, 2013 for the game.)

Robert E. Franken, a professor at University of Calgary defines creativity as the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining ourselves and others. (Human Motivation, 3rd ed., by Robert E. Franken, 1993, Brooks & Cole.)

Vijay Govindarajan differentiates between creativity and innovation, “Creativity is about coming up with the big idea. Innovation is about executing the idea — converting the idea into a successful business. We like to think of an organization’s capacity for innovation as creativity multiplied by execution. We use ‘multiplication’ rather than ‘sum’ because, if either creativity or execution has a score of zero, then the capacity for innovation is zero.” Govindarajan is a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College, and is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on strategy and innovation. (www.blogs.hbr.org/govindarajan/2010/08.)

Outside a business environment creativity and innovation at, say, the individual level tend to be combined. As children learn new words they put them together in strange combinations just to hear how they sound. The more they learn the more permutations are possible, some of which are true, meaningful sentences. This is a type of personal innovation. A few grow to be poets and their children’s literature can be creative: “The shadows where the Mewlips dwell; Are dark and wet as ink; And slow and softly rings their bell; As in the slime you sink.” If your children haven’t read it all, they may enjoy it.

In a feature article in Scientific American, Heather Pringle traces the origins of creativity much farther back in human evolution than previously thought. Archeological evidence recedes into the past at least 3.4 million years ago (MYA) when hominids cut bones with tools and 2.6 million years ago they flaked stone tools in what is now Ethiopia. About 1.76 MYA primitives chipped bifacial stone tools in Kenya and 1 MYA there is ample evidence of controlled fire in South Africa. There, 200,000 years ago Neanderthals in northern Italy created composite tools such as stone points affixed to wooden shafts with glue! The earliest known art is a figure engraved in ocher (iron oxide) in Blombos Cave in South Africa, at least 75,000 years ago. The earliest known musical instruments are flutes found in Germany dating about 42,000 years ago. Cave paintings go back at least 37,000 years ago in Spain, and the first small statue of “Venus” dates back to about 35,000 years ago and was found in Germany. (Scientific American, March 2013, pages 36-43.)

Some shrink from creativity as “weird” or “too different.” Fresh, new ideas make possible new goods and services, creating new jobs which we need desperately. Instead of watching TV tonight, try joining nine dots with four lines: think outside the box.